


despite the abundance

by brucewaynery



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Decapitation, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Protective Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25714354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brucewaynery/pseuds/brucewaynery
Summary: Kozak decapitates Joe.This is what transpired after, what Nicky does, first to Kozak, and then for Joe.(With a healthy side of introspection about souls and what we, as humans, are made of, courtesy of our recently-decapitated immortal)
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 16
Kudos: 298





	despite the abundance

**Author's Note:**

> have had the old guard/joenicky brainrot for the past three weeks. sincerest apologies xx
> 
> thank u a million to hoarmurath on ao3/discord for the beta!!  
> (title from the richard siken poem. i know u know it)  
> (emetophobia warning: one line, non-graphic)

Kozak watches with a sharp, cold fascination as Nicky’s skin knits itself back together. He remembers overwhelmingly curiosity over his own abilities too, almost a millennium ago, he remembers the initial terror, the questions and confusion dominating his mind, he remembers looking over to Joe, an enemy, one of many, then, he remembers his own expression reflected back to him. Fear, terror, confusion. And, later, sick realisations that everyone he’s ever known will die, whilst he remains in stasis, everyone aside from Yusuf, as his enemy says his name is. And even later, years and years and death after death later, gratefulness at… at whatever this is, at whoever gave them the gift, not of immortal life, but of each other. 

“Interesting,” Kozak murmurs, running a cool, gloved hand over where the incision once was, “you’re going to help many people,” she adds, in response to his glare.

“He already has,” Joe calls, still valiantly, uselessly, straining against his restraints as the sedative wears off. One glance from Kozak to the lab tech leaves him silenced once more.

“This will not help anyone,” Nicky says, because he knows it won’t, not in the slightest, they weren’t made to be studied like Darwin’s finches or a particularly interesting pea plant, no human, if that’s what they still were, is made for others to win awards.

“You may be able to recall the past but no one can predict the future,” Kozak tells him, faced away, presumably occupied with one of his, or Joe’s, samples.

“I have seen enough that I know we’re doomed to repeat it.”

“Then why haven’t you fucked off to a private island with your boyfriend for the rest of eternity?”

_Why haven’t you given up yet?_

They have. Many times. And every time, every single time, they always throw themselves back into the frenzy eventually, because people dying before their time, before they make their sharp, definitive mark on the world, people dying in the name of a faceless entity in the name of _honour_ , for a flag, because others want to exploit them to cruel and inhumane extents, from a made-up, created, man-made inequality, none of that will ever be right and whilst that continues to prevail they simply cannot sit idly by. Not if they can make even the slightest difference

“Not my boyfriend,” Nicky says, instead, simply, watching Joe stir from his sedation. He’s disoriented for a second, scanning the rest of the lab before landing on Nicky. He gives him a small smile: _I’m okay, I’m okay as long as I’m with you_.

Kozak is still in the room, somewhere out his line of sight. That doesn’t particularly sit well with Nicky, but he can see Joe, and he’s awake.

“Your skin, muscles, bone, it all regenerates, but what about entire limbs? Do they grow back, like starfish, or must you hold them in place and wait for them to affix themselves?” Kozak says, approaching them with a sterile, gleaming axe.

Nicky knows what Joe’s going to say before it falls out of his mouth, because he knows what a fool his heart is, because he knows that Joe would rather, immediately and without question, let himself get hurt, over and over, before he sees it happen to Nicky. 

Nicky’s too distracted, consumed by anger and fury, to say it first.

“Come closer and find out,” Joe snarls. 

Kozak does just that, easily provoked. She rounds back and approaches him from behind, presumably to cut his arm by the shoulder.

She swings the axe down with an eerie precision right above his larynx. Nicky dies once more, alongside him, suffocating on his own vomit. 

When he comes back, he’s been cleaned up and Joe still doesn’t have a head. His mouth still tastes of bitter butyric acid and Kozak is nowhere to be seen. He dislocates his thumb to slip out of the wrist restraints, making quick work of the rest once he puts his thumb back in the socket. The pain barely gets a classification as ‘background noise’ under the all-consuming anger thundering through him.

He watches Yusuf, he watches his heart and soul slowly, so fucking slowly grow vertebrae and muscle and sinew and organs. His jaw is still just bright white bone, skin just about covering his carotid artery when Kozack comes back in, typing furiously on her tablet. 

Nicky is somewhat happy that Yusuf is yet to grow his eyes and ears back. 

He might have nightmares of it, of slowly, far more cruel than is in his nature, so slowly drawing out Kozak’s death, at such a pace that she was begging to him to end it before he was barely halfway through. Booker’s face, however, when the guards drag him and Andy, when he sees the blood and gore splattered all over the lab, will be seared into his brain for a while.

The soft skin of Joe’s jaw has grown back and his cheekbones are there, bare bone complimenting the white of his skull.

“She cut his head off,” Nicky explains, after he takes out the guards that took them in and unties them. 

Andy doesn’t mention that it’s a death even she hasn’t yet had the pleasure and delight of experiencing.

Nile comes to get them, they deal with Merrick, and table Booker’s betrayal and Andy’s newfound mortality for later.

Well, Nile, Booker and Andy deal with Merrick, Nicky doubles back to the lab after they take out his security team and stays with Joe. He watches his skull grow, then the sinew and skin over it, the cartilage of his ears and his nose, the soft skin of his lips, his eyes, his nerves, his brain, slowly, so fucking slowly, winding and twisting itself, depositing over nine-hundred years of memories back. His eyelashes and his eyebrows are the last to grow back before he’s gasping awake, coughing and bringing a hand up to his throat.

“Joe, Yusuf, my love, you’re okay,” Nicky murmurs in a dialect of Arabic he learned so long ago they may as well be the only ones that still speak it, “she cut off your head, Andy and Booker and Nile are dealing with Merrick, you’re okay.”

“And you?”

Nicky smiles, his face is no doubt just as bloody as the walls around them, “I’m okay, my darling.”

After, after they send off Booker, after Andy takes Nile to travel the world and learn various practices and martial arts and languages (and how to properly treat a bullet wound, how much codeine a human being can safely take, the dangers of infection, the importance of a sterile environment, and how to effectively deal with hangovers), Nicky washes Joe with a reverence that so rarely comes out (a reverence proportional to how often he feels as though he must, the pure _need_ of making sure his entire world is safe after Atlas dares to shrug under him). 

He kisses all the places where the doctor carved out, he traces over the planes of his shoulders and abdomen with his fingers, gently laying a hand to rest over his heart, comfort and ease found in the strong, steady, consistent beat of it.

“Beats for you,” Yusuf murmurs, in a long extinct Genoan dialect, holding Nicolò close, letting his eyes fall shut, lets himself be taken care of. Everything falls away to leave Nicolò’s touch and the steady fall of water, Nicolò’s sure and slow hands, reverent, caring, gentle and the warmth that follows in their wake, Nicolò’s lips, soft and familiar and so fucking affectionate and tender and the way he looks at him, the way astronomers look to the stars and galaxies and quasars, the way Patroclus and Achilles once looked at each other. Half his soul, maybe, but his entire heart and universe.

He is well and truly encompassed, drenched, utterly oversaturated in love and care beyond any words in the myriad of languages they share could even hope to describe, and he could stay, just like that, until the universe explodes around them. 

They dry off at some point and leave the shower but their bubble stays intact. Nicky dresses him some time between the shower and the bed. 

“Let me hold you tonight,” Nicolò asks, though he knows the answer and he’s not really asking. His need to hold Yusuf, to wrap himself around him outranks his need to stand guard between him and the door. They’re the closest thing to civilization for miles and they’re the only ones who know where they are. For a given value of the word, they’re safe.

They’re lying on the grass outside in each other’s arms, staring up into the night sky. Well, Yusuf is gazing at the moon in a way that means tomorrow he’ll go to the closet town and find some pastels, maybe some chalk and render the full moon in all her glory, Yusuf is memorising the details of the moon once more and Nicolò is tracing his love’s profile with his eyes, recommitting it to memory, as if he wouldn’t already know him by touch alone. 

“We have souls,” Yusuf says, low and soft enough that he doesn’t break the atmosphere between them.

Nicolò knows that he’s talking about his decapitation. Yusuf didn’t pretend, in the following days, that he’d walked that one off as easily as the rest, there wouldn’t be any point of pretending, not with Nicky. Physically, he’s fine, if a little slimmer - by about five kilograms, or eleven pounds, according to the internet, and the hair on his head and beard is slowly growing back, and he’s alive and intact but it had shaken him somewhat.

“We are not just what is in our heads, or the shape of our bodies, we are our souls that hold our memories and the fundamentals of our person.”

He loves Nicolò with his entire being, he loves him with his soul, the very fiber of his person is an empire for him, beyond measure and reason.

Logic determines that to be true. Had they not have had souls, Yusuf would not remember himself, or his life.

Logic dictates they should tell someone, tell a philosopher, or a scientist, prove that souls really exist, though apodictics and nature dictate they should keep it to themselves. Human belief in something, true and genuine, makes no exceptions for such fickle and trivial things such as cogent evidence.

“My soul is yours,” Nicolò murmurs, pressing a kiss to the nearest part of Yusuf, his collarbone, cut across with his necklace.

“As mine is yours, Nico,” he replies, coaxing his head up to kiss him properly. 

Their souls are one, not incomplete without the other, not initially lost without the other, but once one has a compass, once one has become used to a bright north star, darkness is far more surreal than it once had been. 

Nicolò cannot predict the future with any accuracy, despite the centuries he’s lived and the repetitiveness of history and humanity, but he can, with relative certainty, know for an indisputable fact, that for he and Yusuf’s souls are intertwined, twisted inseparable vines, for they were, for a given value of the word, born together and they will, for a given value of the word, die together, and enter the next life, the afterlife, or endless, infinite oblivion together. 

**Author's Note:**

> big thanks for reading!! drop a comment/kudo if u would like, i love u dearly
> 
> (superbat love languages next or more joenicky)
> 
> xoxo brucewaynery


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